Spinning Heart

Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, County Tipperary, has published seven number one bestselling novels and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016. In 2021 Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.

"Funny, moving and beautifully written" -- Edna O'Brien "[An] extraordinarily accomplished first novel... here is a new Irish writer of the very first order. Donal Ryan is the real deal. ... a brilliantly realised, utterly resonant state-of-the-nation landscape ... Ryan's feat is considerable. Narrative and character information is distributed among so many different voices and yet we never feel at a loss. Even the characters on the margins of the story ... add compelling colour and texture. Best of all, Ryan's ear for speech is acute. ... Given a novel as brilliantly realised as The Spinning Heart, I see no reason to look anywhere but the present. For Donal Ryan, the future is now." -- Declan Hughes Sunday Independent "Donal Ryan's precise and evocative debut ... is a textured account of a community as it was during a brief moment of time. ... unexpectedly tender ... Ryan's prism of life and lives is compellingly humane. ... This is an exciting, relevant and believable contemporary novel about the lost and the wounded that listens to the present without discarding either the sins of the fathers or the literary legacy of the past." -- Eileen Battersby The Irish Times "There's a powerful sense of place and shared history binding Ryan's many voices, their inner and outer selves, distilling a linguistic richness comparable to Under Milk Wood... Ryan's novel ... seems to draw speech out of the deepest silences; the testimony of his characters rings rich and true - funny and poignant and banal and extraordinary - and we can't help but listen." The Guardian "Powerful and affecting ... [a] superb, unforgettable and topical debut." The Times